


The Paradigm of Uncertainty

by PinkLetterDay



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-06
Updated: 2018-12-06
Packaged: 2019-09-12 21:22:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16879410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PinkLetterDay/pseuds/PinkLetterDay
Summary: Timelines branch out beyond reckoning. Every win leaves behind a loss they will never know.





	The Paradigm of Uncertainty

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken with apologies to Lori Summers.

She’s watched him die so many times. 

_The whine of the heart monitor ringing through her head as his body falls back on the hospital bed, limp as a rag doll._

_Crucified on the second particle accelerator, face a white mask of agony before disintegrating into smoke._

_His final scream piercing through her soul, inaudible to everyone else,  as the red-gold ring at the base of the Magnetar blazes incandescent. Knowing the exact moment his body vaporizes into atoms, scattering across the universe. A heartstring snapping inside her before the light ever dies, leaving a hollow space she doesn’t understand, because Barry isn’t dead, Barry’s right there on the ground with Zoom._

_She holds him as he slumps against her in exhaustion, heat radiating from his living body while the the inexplicable grief keeps howling in her heart._

They called him a time remnant, trying to convince themselves that he was some expendable mirage, not really Barry. But she’s not an idiot. The Barry that had died on the Magnetar is the same one whose hand she had taken and led out of the Speed Force, who had given her wedding rings at Christmas and let her keep stealing his fries. Who had once been a little boy shaking with night-terrors in her bed.

_The same one she had shot dead. The same one who had collapsed safe in her arms seconds later._

They tell her that speedsters can erase timelines on a whim, so that entire universes unravel and wind together in new patterns, that this is the only present that exists. But she knows they aren’t certain, not really. How can anyone be sure of anything when they live in the paradigm of uncertainty, where all things have happened and none.

Is there an Iris West that died in a tsunami at the waterfront? Is some version of her still waiting on her father’s stoop for the boy who had promised to come back to her? Did a woman who never grew up with Barry bury her brother, abandoned by a man she knew and loved for less than a day? How many iterations of her have lost him, will lose him, over and over, until one day the universe never gives any version of him back?

_“I’ll always come home to you, Iris.”_

His eyes are always full of earnest promise when he says it, still the same boy determined to bend the future to his will, whether to prove the impossible or save her life.

_But which one of you will come home to which one of me, Barry?_


End file.
